


Sha-La-La-La-La Kiss the Boy (Hip-Hop Remix)

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: DJ Dave, Disney movie retelling, Drowning, Kink Meme, M/M, genre savviness, mild violence/gore, someone dies but gets better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-17
Updated: 2012-04-17
Packaged: 2017-11-03 19:46:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time there was a merman named Tavros who was curious about the land-animals that came to the beach, and especially about the one in the tinted goggles.  So he went to his half-sister, the witch with eight tentacles, and asked to be given legs.</p><p>(Or, Disney's <i>Little Mermaid</i>-ish Stuck.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sha-La-La-La-La Kiss the Boy (Hip-Hop Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> The title is all thanks to slipstreamborne. So are elements of the climax.
> 
> Originally posted [here](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/11448.html?thread=19752120#t19752120) on the Homesmut Kink Meme.

Once upon a time there lived a merman named Tavros. He lived in the castles near the coast, where the seas were not too deep and the waters clear, and the fish plentiful.

His father was a great warrior, who was kind in his own way, and who wished for Tavros to be a great warrior as well. But Tavros was possessed of a gentle nature, and perhaps would have been better suited to social work, but he too longed to be a great warrior. He was a student of the lance, the weapon of his father's Corps, and the many seasons of practice had given him a fine figure, with broad shoulders and much muscle.

And he was curious. After seeing the strange fleshy creatures that moved on the land, with four arms – two like normal, and two arms instead of fins – when he was young, he had often gone close to shore to observe them.

Not too close, of course - but close enough to see the small ones playing in the sand and the water, and the big ones reading books, or lying under the sun talking.

There was a man – Tavros supposed it was a man, though who knew what land-animals were like, if they even had sexes or genders – who sat on a very tall chair, wearing black-tinted goggles, and with light-colored hair, and he was very handsome, for an animal with four arms. He was also there day after day.

One day, while Tavros was watching, a little girl drifted away while her mother was talking to another child, and when a large wave came the little girl was submerged, and came up choking, and went under again.

The mother wasn't watching, but the little girl would die if –

Tavros swam. Picked her up out of the water, knowing that he looked strange to the land-animals' eyes, with his grey dappled hide for keeping him safe and his teeth meant for tearing the flesh of fish, while she gasped, and he swam her over to her mother, pressed the little girl up against the mother's back and then dashed away, under the water.

He hoped the girl was all right, that no one had seen him. He was all right with the land-animals seeing him, personally, but what if they came looking for his people, and in saving a little girl he'd sacrificed everyone he knew?

Swimming further away, he let his head pop up out of the water, and saw that the man in the tall chair was on the sand with the little girl and the mother, looking after her. He was gentle with the girl, and Tavros, reassured, swam away.

+++

That night, the man was still sitting on the beach, this time with some sort of box next to him. It made strange music, unfamiliar to Tavros, but rhythmic. Tavros didn't understand the land-animals' language, but it sounded like some kind of land-animal equivalent to slam poetry. He liked slam poetry. That the man might like it too was – too much. To be handsome and kind and good with music, and so far away.

So Tavros went to his half-sister.

His half-sister by the same mother, whom his father had loved and lost and would never speak of, lived deeper in the sea, and she had an octopus's lower half instead of a fish's, like Tavros. She had studied magic from a very young age, and had become a powerful sorceress over the years.

She lived now in a little cave, and so he went to it.

"Vriska?" he said at the entrance.

"Fryling!" she called out from somewhere inside. "Come in!"

He went in.

"It's been so long since I've seen you! Are you still too nice to join the fighting like a real warrior?" she laughed. One of her tentacles curled around his fin.

"I don't think I'm, afraid to fight, if there's a reason to," he said, stuttering a little because Vriska always made him nervous. "But I, would like a favor."

"What is it?" she pressed her face up close to his, their noses almost brushing.

"I want to be a land-animal, just for a little while."

She jerked away. "What!"

"I want to be a land-animal. To find out what they're like."

She sneered. "You're too soft to be a merman, and so now you want to be one of them, and run away from your father's great name and expectations!"

"That's not it at all!"

"So what _is_ it?" she asked, peering into his eyes, and then laughed, and pressed a finger against his nose. "You're in love, Fryling! Or think you are, anyway. And with a land-animal!"

He clenched his hands behind his back, because it was the truth, and with her magic she could easily defeat him in a fight.

"Well, I think if it's love I can find a way to help you," she said, "but you know that that's not an easy spell, and all magic has a price. I'll have to take something valuable from you."

"Like what?"

Vriska pursed her lips, and tapped one long fingernail against them. "Most spells require that you don't talk about the circumstances before they were cast, but this one's a lot stronger than most spells, so I think I'll have to take your voice."

He covered his mouth, pointlessly, and then said, "I only want to be a land-animal for a little while."

She wrinkled her nose, and looked at the walls of her little cave, then said, "I can give you eight days. But at the end of the eight days you turn back into a merman, and if you're not by the water you'll die. And you might not get your voice back – I don't know about that one; sometimes you are lucky in magic, and sometimes not. And once you turn back, you can never be a land-animal again."

That was so much. Too much, maybe, to give just to meet him. But if it were worth it...

"Yes," he said, and his half-sister picked up a knife.

"This will hurt," she said, "but you can't go back now."

"What? I," he said, and then she plunged it into his spine, and started to cut down.

+++

He woke lying on the beach, with the man kneeling beside him.

"You awake?" the man asked. Tavros nodded.

"Can you talk?"

Tavros opened his mouth, tried to speak, but nothing emerged, as he'd expected, so he shook his head.

"How many fingers am I holding up?"

Tavros held up three of his own, to match.

"Have you hit your head? Are you in pain?"

Another head shake.

"Dizziness? Light-headedness?"

 _I'm fine,_ Tavros wanted to say, but he couldn't. There were a lot of questions, but the last one was, "Can you walk?" and Tavros didn't know, so he sat up, and tried to get on his lower-arms.

He fell down into the sand.

"Taking that as a no, okay," the man said. "Here, lean on me."

Between the two of them they managed to get Tavros staggered over to a bench, where they sat.

"You got a name?" the man asked, then after Tavros grinned sheepishly, said, "Right, you can't talk. Can you write it down?"

And Tavros knew from the things that divers had dropped that the land-animals had a different writing system than merpeople, but he found now that he knew it, thanks to Vriska's magic, so he traced out the letters on the table while the man watched.

"Tavros. You got a last name?"

Tavros wrote it down.

"Tavros Nitram. Nice to meet you. Name's Dave Strider. What were you doing on the beach?"

Tavros shrugged, because he didn't want to go to the trouble of writing out _trying to meet you,_ as that would sound creepy, not to mention be time-consuming. _Dave._ It was an exotically simple name.

"If I Google you, will I get any hits?"

What was 'google'? Tavros just shrugged and smiled.

"Right, okay," Dave said. "I'm actually not on duty this afternoon. Want to go back to my place and chill?"

Tavros nodded.

+++

For dinner, Dave fed him something - strange. Tavros didn't know what it was and didn't remember what Dave had called it, and was afraid to ask for the name again because Dave was already suspicious. So he ate it.

It tasted good. Tavros was used to eating fish, and seaweed, and occasionally the other things that grew in the sea, but usually raw. To have something that was prepared until you didn't know what it was made of was new. He had been considered somewhat soft-hearted for making sure the fish he ate were dead before he started eating.

Dave gave him a blanket and told him he could sleep on the couch, and did he want a shower?

Tavros shrugged, not knowing what it was, and Dave adjusted his goggles and said, "I'll go first then."

Dave went into the toilet room, closed the door, and water started running for a long time. Maybe a shower was some kind of cleaning ritual. In that case, it wouldn't be bad - there was sand in his clothes, from when he had been lying on the beach, and although that wouldn't have bothered him as a merman, it irritated his soft hide now.

Dave came out of the toilet room with damp hair and a few water droplets on his skin, his chest bare and a pair of shorts around his waist, like what he wore when he was working but in different colors. Tavros averted his eyes and blushed. From far away was one thing, but seeing him so close was another thing entirely, and completely unexpected.

He went into the toilet-room, and managed to figure out by trial and error how to take a shower.

When he got back out of the shower, there was a blanket on the couch, and a pillow, so he figured that was where he would be sleeping. So he did.

+++

The next day he woke to Dave shaking him by the shoulder.

"I gotta work," Dave said, "and I'm on duty from ten to three. You wanna come with, or do you just want to stick around here? Afterwards we can do something or whatever, and then tonight I'm working a party, but."

Tavros wasn't sure he wanted to go to the beach and see the sea again. He might miss it, or Vriska might have played a trick on him and made it so that if he touched water he would turn back again early.

He nodded anyway.

"Was that for going?"

A nod.

"Cool. You can help me sunscreen up."

+++

Clearly whoever had invented this sun-protection lotion was a pervert. Tavros couldn't believe that this was allowed in _public_. It felt obscene, being asked to touch so much of Dave, to help protect him.

"Do you need any?" Dave asked once Tavros had smeared the goop all over his warm, dappled back.

Once Dave was looking, Tavros shrugged.

"You're pretty dark, so you'll probably be okay, but might as well," Dave said, and daubed some of the sun-protection lotion on Tavros's nose and ears.

The beach was interesting from this perspective too, watching everyone from so close. He sat on the sand, which got warm as the sun rose higher, and watched them play, and occasionally Dave would come down and talk to him for a few minutes at a time.

He fell asleep at some point, and woke to Dave sitting next to him, watching the waves. Tavros sat up, and looked curiously over at Dave, but he couldn't tell what Dave was feeling because of the goggles.

"I'm off duty," Dave said. "You wanna go shower off, get dinner, and then head to the party?"

Tavros nodded.

Dinner was a completely different set of flavors from last night, or from what Dave had brought him for lunch. Everything was bright with flavor, and sauces, and he didn't know what he thought but – it was all good, everything of it.

And then the party –

Dave had put some boxes in the back of his transportation box, the one with the wheels, and then they had gone to a building, and stopped the machine and turned it off. And then Tavros had helped him carry them in, where Dave opened the boxes and put the things inside them – big square things, with round panels on top – down, and started plugging in cords. It was impressive, how much stuff there was. Tavros didn't have any idea what any of them were.

He found out soon enough, when music started to come out of the speakers, and Dave's hands on the flat discs that he had put on the boxes changed what the sounds were.

It was beautiful, and amazing, and then people started coming into the room and dancing to the music that Dave was making, and Tavros -

Tavros watched Dave's muscles shift as he worked, unaffected by the pounding beats, and thought that if the next seven days were like this one, he was in trouble.

+++

The third day, too, Dave had to work, but instead of going to a party afterwards they went home, and Dave said, before they ate, "Do you want to watch a movie?"

Tavros shrugged, not wanting to give away that he didn't know what Dave was talking about.

"Is that a whatever-shrug or an I-don't-know-what-movies-are shrug?"

Tavros smiled, embarrassed, and nodded.

"You're in for a treat," Dave said, and went to the strange flat box across from the couch, and turned it on.

There were tiny people inside, talking! Tavros touched the front, wondering if they were stuck there, as an explosion rocked the building the people were in but the box didn't move at all.

So maybe it was just a picture, then. He could handle that, he thought.

"This is great cinema," Dave intoned, sliding a small disc, smaller than the ones his music had come from, into the box. "I'm gonna pop the popcorn while the previews come on, and then we'll watch."

The movie was called _The Little Mermaid_ , and Tavros went cold, because Dave obviously _knew_ , and he'd kill Tavros or make him show where the other merfolk were.

But when Dave came back from the food-space he just sat down on the couch and pressed some buttons on a remote-control device, a bag of something tasty-smelling in his hand, and the movie started playing.

It _was_ Tavros.

Oh, well, Ariel had red hair, and looked completely human from the waist up, and her fin was green instead of brownish like Tavros's, and she had shells over her breasts instead of seaweed like a sensible woman, but she was still _him_ , the falling in love with a human and the witch with the eight legs and –

Dave paused the movie as soon as Ariel was on land.

"Way to make me feel like a douche," he said, inexplicably, and handed Tavros a flimsy handkerchief from a box by the side of the couch.

Tavros brushed a hand over his cheek, and realized he'd been crying. Oh. That must have been why.

"Is that you?" Dave said. "The merman who wanted to walk on land and went to a witch who took away his voice."

Tavros tried to nod but couldn't bring himself to – wouldn't that violate the terms of the deal he'd made with Vriska? – so instead he just stared at the wet handkerchief.

"Thought so," Dave said. "How long're you gonna be here?"

Tavros held up eight fingers.

"Welp," Dave said. "That's better than three, for sure. I was worried you'd die or something if I didn't kiss you tonight."

Tavros almost cried out, _I'll die if you **do** ,_ but of course he couldn't.

+++

The fourth day they went to the beach in the morning so Dave could work, and then in the afternoon went to an abandoned fort that was now a museum. There was green vegetation in a lot of places, and big iron things that Tavros recognized from some of the shipwrecks that were in a neighboring area to his that he'd seen once. He didn't know what they were.

"Cannons," Dave said, tapping on the metal. "They're obsolete now, but they shoot huge metal balls, which hit things and destroy them. For war, you know. If you shoot cannons at ships they sink. But you'd know that." And here his mouth quirked at Tavros.

Afterwards, they got seafood at a restaurant, and it was doubly strange knowing that he was eating fish but that it had been cooked. It tasted, of course, wonderful, like all the food he'd had here so far.

+++

The fifth day there was a party at the beach that Dave had been hired to keep watch over, so they stayed for that, both of them. And after the music had been turned off – this DJ wasn't nearly as good as Dave - and everyone had gone to their homes, Dave and Tavros were still there, and they lay on the beach, and Dave pointed out some of the stars, and the constellations that the humans used, and the stories behind them.

The merfolk's stories about the stars were different, of course, but Dave had brought along a computer and Tavros could type things as long as he was careful to keep the sand away from it. The screen was easy to read in the darkness.

 _That one over there,_ Tavros typed, then pointed, _is the Empress. She's a witch, too, and very powerful. She has a daughter, whom I've met a few times, but that's her constellation._

"Huh," Dave said. "How does your government work, anyway?"

_The Empress decides a lot of things, but if the Great Clan heads disagree with her decisions, they can change them if they need to._

"Great Clan?"

_There are Great Clans and just clans. Great Clans are represented by colors – red, orange, yellow, and so on. Clans are within a color, and have their own crest. My father and I are in the same clan, but my half-sister is in a different Great Clan, because her color is different._

"Like skin color?"

_Blood._

"You bleed in different colors?"

_Yes. I would bleed orange, but she bleeds cerulean._

"That's weird."

Tavros shrugged, and smiled, and typed, _It's not weird for us. Do you have clans, too?_

"Not based on blood color," Dave said, and then, "You ever seen a plane flying at night?"

Tavros looked up at where Dave was pointing, and saw the light moving across the sky, crossing paths with lights of stars.

_What is a plane?_

"A big bird-like machine. For traveling fast over long distances."

_That sounds very dangerous._

"Not really."

 _And at the end there's something new to see, probably,_ Tavros typed, and because it was perfect and the night was warm and Dave was being kind to him, and there were only three days left, Tavros sat up a little, leaned over, and kissed him.

And Dave kissed back.

+++

Day six, Tavros woke up first. He didn't know how to cook, so he didn't get out of the bed, and instead just watched the light glimmer off Dave's hair, play against his closed eyelids.

They hadn't had sex, just kissed a lot, when they got back to Dave's home, but Dave had only taken his goggles off right before they'd gone to sleep, keeping them on during the kissing. Probably he was more comfortable like that.

Eventually Dave woke up, and Tavros looked away before Dave's eyes opened, letting him put on his goggles again in peace.

They went to the beach again, so Dave could work, and this time Tavros had a notebook to write in. Every so often he would bring it up to Dave on his lifeguard's chair, and they would talk for a little while, before Tavros went back down again.

This time, he got close enough for the water to lap at his feet. It felt strange, having feet instead of a fin, but not bad, exactly. The sand clung to his wet feet when he walked back.

Dave was DJing again that night, so Tavros went with him, and helped him set up as best he could. Listened to him play.

On a whim, since it wasn't voice, exactly, he tried to imitate the sound of the bass beat thundering through the room, and while he couldn't tell if it was any good, he practiced, that and a couple of other imitations. If he couldn't talk, then at least he could do something like singing.

+++

The seventh day Dave had off work, so once they made it out of bed, which took a while, they drove a ways, to a different kind of museum. This one was about the history of the area, talking about the people who had been there long ago. Tavros didn't understand many of the references – they were talking about countries, which he understood, but he didn't know which countries were which, although Dave said they were in a country called _The United States,_ or sometimes _America,_ which was strange because the words were nothing alike.

After the museum they walked around a bit and saw some shops, selling clothes and jewelry and food and drinks and books, and Tavros looked at everything, and wrote out questions in the notebook when they came to him. Dave tried to stay calm-looking but he was always smiling when he thought Tavros wasn't looking, and whenever Tavros had to lean over on a display table to write something in the notebook, Dave would lean over his shoulder, his hand resting at the small of Tavros's back.

They stood on the docks for the fishing boats, which would be going out early in the morning the next day, before the sun was even up, and stared out at the horizon, before going back home.

In bed, Dave kissed him and kissed him, and said, "If you can ever come back –" and buried the rest of what he wanted to say in Tavros's shoulder.

Tavros wanted to say, _I can't come back, I never can,_ but of course he couldn't, and instead he wrapped Dave up in his arms and held him and held him until Dave fell asleep against his shoulder.

+++

He went with Dave to work the next morning, and everything inside him ached.

A woman went out too far, and Dave had to swim out to her and make sure she came back to the beach, though she wasn't hurt or drowning or anything.

Around four o'clock, just as Dave was about to get off shift, a woman came up to Tavros. She had a wild mess of dark hair, and was wearing a bikini in a slightly green-tinged blue, and she was wearing glasses.

"Fryling," she said, and sat down in the sand beside him. She leaned over and jammed him in the ribs with her elbow, then poked at the bruises on his neck from Dave kissing him last night.

"Looks like you got what you wanted," she teased, "maybe you're not a complete failure after all! Oh, wait – you have to go home after this, and then you can never see him again. Isn't that sweet! Dramatic irony."

He couldn't even tell her to go away, and she kissed his cheek.

"Who's this," Dave said, flatly, standing in front of them.

"I'm his sister," Vriska said, jumping to her feet and sidling up to Dave, looking him over. "He is cute, if you like animals. Maybe your taste isn't completely terrible."

"Only the most discerning of palates would want this prime piece of man-meat," Dave said.

"I just bet!" Vriska said, and kissed him full on the mouth. "I'll be around, Fryling. Don't worry, you'll be back home soon enough." She sauntered away, towards the water.

Dave wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. "Ugh. Lady needs some lessons in dental hygiene."

Tavros couldn't help but grin and kiss him.

+++

The sun fell lower and lower in the sky, until finally Tavros's skin started itching.

 _I think it's time for me to go,_ he wrote in the sand.

"I'll go with you for a bit," Dave said, and stood with him.

The water was cool against his legs, and then warmed as his blood changed back, as the warm color began to leech from his skin and his legs began to fuse together. The gills in his ribs formed again, and flared open, and he felt his teeth changing. Nothing hurt, and Dave didn't seem frightened, treading water beside him and just watching.

When it was over, Dave pulled him close and kissed him, there above the water.

"Don't care if you come back," Dave said, which hurt like brushing up against the trails of a jellyfish, "but if you do, you'd better find me."

So maybe he cared more than he wanted to say.

"I –" Tavros started to say, surprised that he could finally talk again, that Dave would be able to hear his voice, and then Dave dropped under the surface of the water.

"Hello, Fryling!" Vriska called out, two of her tentacles holding onto Dave's feet, dragging him down even as he struggled. "I thought since you liked him so much you might want to keep him!"

"Let him go!" Tavros shouted, and swam down at her. He was almost weaponless, except for his teeth and his horns, and she was a witch, but –

She curled some more of her tentacles around his fin, so he couldn't get away, and then they were fighting, clawing at each other, one of his horns locked with hers and them both trying to punch or claw at the other.

He was going to lose, he knew it when she ripped open one of his gills, orange blood spilling into the dark water, and he tore himself out of her grasp. Swam behind her – her grip on Dave was slowing her down – and clawed furrows in her back, tore at the ends of her tentacles.

He managed to rip off one of the ones holding Dave, and she cried out, letting go of him, her blood coloring the water in dark plumes, and she shouted out a spell and disappeared, probably to tend her own wounds.

Tavros, breathing hard, gasping with pain, turned in the water.

Dave wasn't there.

He wasn't -

He was spilled out on the roof of a tower, unmoving, his eyes closed and not breathing because of course he couldn't breathe, and there were purple suction marks on his ankles from Vriska's grip, almost-matching the bruises on his shoulders from Tavros's teeth.

He would have been beautiful if he weren't dead.

Tavros swam down to him, curled his injured fin around Dave's umoving legs. Pressed his lips to Dave's mouth and wished that he could give Dave air like this, like they had done when they were kissing, but instead he just felt Dave's skin growing colder and colder. Last night he'd listened to Dave's heart beat, and now there was nothing.

"I _thought_ I heard something," said a woman's voice from beside him. "Hi."

He turned his head just enough to see Feferi, the Heiress, floating beside the tower's edge. "Hi," he said, closing his eyes again, and then jerked alert. " _Please_ you – he's dead Vriska my sister took him – your Highness _please_."

She glided over to him, pressed her fingers to Dave's neck. "He's only been dead for a couple of minutes. I might be able to help, but I can't promise anything. My mom could, but she doesn't..."

"It's fine." It would be enough, if she could just make Dave not-dead enough to go back to the beach, so that the humans could save him properly.

"I'll have to take some of your life, you know."

"I don't care."

Her eyes flicked up to him. "You love him."

"Yes."

"That's good! It'll make my job easier." She curled a hand under Dave's head, and took Tavros's hand, and rested it over Dave's heart, with hers on top of Tavros's.

"You know," she said, "If you're already giving him some of your life, you might as well give him part of yourself, and borrow something of his."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you want to see him again, I think we could work out a way to make it happen."

"I – I – your Highness I –"

"I can't promise it'll work, but you could both choose, that way. And change, if you wanted." She looked at him. "Is that what you want?"

" _Yes_ ," he breathed.

"Well," she said, "he'll need gills, so –"

"Mine – Vriska, she," he said, and turned, so she could see that his was torn.

"I'm going to have to cut it off," the Witch-Heiress said.

Tavros nodded, and she took out a knife.

It didn't hurt more than it was already hurting. She clawed grooves in Dave's sides, where his gills would have been if he were a merman, and set Tavros's gill in one of them, and then they grew, filling up with Dave's bright-red blood.

"And for you to be able to have legs," she said. "I'll have to cut off a part of him."

"No!" Tavros cried, stopping her knife hand as it reached toward Dave's feet. "That's not – don't, don't hurt him."

She looked up at him, then down at Dave's ankles, where there was blood standing out now in his wounds.

"I'll use some of his blood, then, is that okay?" she said, and Tavros nodded.

She slid the point of the blade against the marks Dave had gotten from Vriska's tentacles, getting it smeared pinkish, and then ran the flat of her blade against the scores on Tavros's fin from his fight. It stung a little, and then went hot with her magic as she rested her hands over it, and then he felt – too big for himself, incomplete.

"You'll never be able to walk," she said, "but you'll have legs, and look like them."

"That's fine," Tavros said, "that's more than enough."

"And then the last part," the Heiress told him, "I can start, but the rest is up to you. I can make him have only been sleeping, but you have to wake him up." She was smiling, though, so Tavros smiled back.

"Okay," he said, and she rested her hands on Dave's chest, and pressed hard once, twice, and then she said, "Swim quickly."

Tavros picked Dave up, brought him to the surface, to the beach. Laid him down, half in the path of the waves and half out, and kissed him.

Dave heaved in a breath, leaned over, and vomited up water.

"Fuck," he said.

"I don't think we're anatomically compatible right now," Tavros said.

"Was I dead?"

"Yes."

"Am I still dead?"

"No, the Empress's daughter saved you. And me, a little. And, uh, now you –" Tavros pointed at Dave's ribs, just as a big wave came and washed up to his chest. His gills flared into existence, and open.

"I have fucking gills."

"Yep! And I can make legs!" Tavros did so, and wiggled his toes, then changed back. "I can't walk, though."

Dave stared up at the night sky, where the moon was bright. "Good enough for government work," he said, and laid a hand on Tavros's cheek. "I'm not gonna kiss you because my mouth tastes like seawater barf, but pretend I did."

"Okay," Tavros said, and kissed his cheek instead.

"Want to show me your world?"

"Definitely," Tavros said, inching deeper into the water. Dave followed him, and they held hands all the way down.  



End file.
